I know this may be difficult for some of you, gentle readers, but this post will be properly read with Frank Zappa, the Hot Rats version of Willie the Pimp playing ... LOUD in the FOREGROUND! It's a ten minute track.

I also think of it as a wee update to Environmental Apocalypse Greatest Hits, previously in this blog. Not a soul asked for a copy of the mixed CD but the offer is still open: send me a mailing address and I will send a CD with all of the tunes.

Though it may be better named:

Armageddon Ragnarök Greatest Hits.

Marshall McLuhan - Tribal Spiral, December 18 2005, almost a decade ago. The thoughts below (such as they are) follow on from this early post in my blogging career (which I only embarked upon because they brought me there and set me in a cubicle with a computer and nothing to do for almost a year).

Blogger has evolved since then and the thing is about impossible to read unless you [CTRL +] a few times to make the text larger.

At that time I was working for Halliburton in Houston - a consolation prize for having been finessed out of a position on Barracuda/Caratinga in Brazil by an unscrupulous Newfoundlander - but it was about over. A week or so after this post they offered me a five-year extension on the contract and I had a vision of hell-on-earth so profound that hours later I was in a taxi to the George W. Bush Airport fleeing back to k-k-k-Canada - well, Newfoundland actually.

McLuhan's words quoted in that post come from a 1969 interview he did with Playboy Magazine (remember when we read Playboy for the articles? :-) and this bit,

Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

comes from towards the end of that interview.

Now, if you know enough of McLuhan to see that this 'mystical body of Christ' he is on about no longer has any flesh (with our brains on the outside of our skulls and all) then maybe you can step directly to an appreciation of the resulting humanoid as Golem. And at that point there is no need to read further.

When humanity no longer has flesh there is no more reason to fear extinction. That it is only urban ideological idiots willing to flirt with the thresholds of cosmic black holes who can seriously entertain such nonsense ... well, I rest my case.

A-and this, gentle reader, is as close as I have gotten to answering the question of why humanity is not facing the environmental armageddon it has engineered itself into. It's the nitwit urban muggles!

What set me off (if you are interested) was tOad's illustration aimed at the People's Climate March a few Sundays ago. I couldn't figgure it out; but after looking at it for a while I began to wonder if he was drawing a Golem eating a whale (with no difficulty at all, like a kid swallowing a goldfish)?

I have been re-reading Marshall McLuhan's books and eventually, thinking of a Golem as a creature of clay I remembered the Tribal Spiral post referenced above. Thanks to Google's excellent search capabilities it takes me only several days to find it, and, sure enough, there's the connection.

These Catholics never give up on the unified spirit of which we are each a glowing flake. Teilhard de Chardin and his noosphere, Charles Taylor proselytizing towards the end of 'A Secular Age' &c. &c. - but I always have the impression that they are trying to slide it in without anyone really noticing. Of course I say that because I'm a bigot.

McLuhan captures us with keen and accurate little observations - of the stripper who is actually 'wearing' us f'rinstance. He tries (unsuccessfully) to generalize them and gets carried away ... like the kid swallowing the goldfish.

He is (properly I think) compared with Toqueville. There's lots of good in 'im - particularly, insights into up-side / down-side. But keep in mind the similarly flavoured geometric bullshit promoted by our Bucky; Buckminster Fuller and his two volumes of 'Synergetics' (which I have actually read). If you want useful geometry look to Harold Coxeter not Bucky. If you want useful spiritual metaphors look to Northrop Frye not McLuhan.

Like McLuhan I had a vision of computers: email properly used (meaning people actually read it); the net as a huge encyclopaedic book accessible and remembered with hypertext links (except that, like Bryophytes, the Internet grows by 'death from behind' and the links don't work dependably for long); 4GLs (of which I wrote one) that would 'fully realize' SQL as an intuitive tool (instead it has been mystified into incomprehensibility and beyond).

Anyway, as Bob Dylan says somewhere, "Anyone with any sense has already left town."

Tiny Stories:
Luan was very much alone. His lonliness ended when he After two weeks Otto ran away.
"... and now a recipe for adopted Otto, a mongrel.
mashed potatoes!" "Otto! Otto!" &nbsp "Bark! Bark!"

Hello? Industry removal service please.

Humans created They told God not First chance he got The humans It was supposed to
God, and at first to eat the he went and ate it. sent God away. be just for a little
it was fine. forbidden fruit. while but God
never came back.

Thinking about whether or not CSIS and the Mounties have facial recognition software hooked up to their CCTV? What would it mean if they did? More on this later.